A new site, a new employee and a new year!

In which you ask of Charlie, “Now why don’t he write?”, he explains it all and you laugh tears of joy and kindly forgive him.

Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to the newly revamped Charfish Design site. I trust you had a good and safe holiday!

First things first: where have we been? Busy as all hell, that’s where. We’ve just completed our second year of rockin’ the web with sexy design, and it was a crazy one. So much so that any update to this site’s content has been virtually impossible. Given the choice between client work and updating our own stuff…well, we chose the client work.

But then, we DO have a readership here that doesn’t consist entirely of clients. We can’t go on ignoring all of them, eh? So get ready for some new content on a regular basis. Yes…we’ve said that before, but that was all just a lie.

What’s new?

It is practically a requirement that a person write an “end of year, what I am going to do now” post every time we roll over into a new January. So, here you go:

New Charfish Design site! Now with twice the flavor!

While the old site was getting the job done just fine, we wanted to make some changes to its overall usability. First on the list was making it easier to navigate for Ye Olde Readers. We’ve consolidated the site quite a bit, but unless you’ve spent a lot of time here you might not notice the changes. Suffice it to say that we’ve saved you at least one mouse-click per visit to our site and thereby prevented years of index finger joint therapy. You’re welcome.

Second was getting the site up to speed design-wise. I mean come on, this is 2010, right? Eye-candy is out…minimalism is (still) in. So we went more minimal. There is altogether much more whitespace and breathing room here. Not only is whitespace awesome all on its own, it’s also really good for us lazy folk because we get to design less.

A new employee person item

Gang, I’d like to officially welcome a new employee to the Charfish tribe! Her name is Annora.

Who is Annora? First and foremost she’s a human, which saves us from awkward stares during client meetings. On top of that, she’s a pro photographer, wicked ebook designer, JavaScript junkie and all around amazing person.

And she’s wicked smart in the head area. You tell her, “Hey, Annora, why don’t you try to do this thing you’ve never heard of before and do it better than me without having any practice or even asking the Google?” And she’ll say, “Done. Here it is. I’m going for coffee.” And you look at what she did and you drool a bit. Amazing eye for design and you’ll see quite a bit of her work in our newly revamped ebook portfolio.

And speaking of portfolio…

As part of the new site design, we’ve also created slick new portfolio pages for our websites, ebooks and logos.

The way we coded up the portfolio pages is also going to save us about 18 hours per update, so you’ll be seeing more work more often here. Yay!

That about covers the update for now, so what’s in our near future? Here ’tis:

What’s coming up for us?

We promise to post AT LEAST once a month, we swear!

More goodies on the way…like textures! Everyone loves the textures. And more icons! Freebies galore and items you can give your granny via email! She loves that.

A WordPress theme of awesomeness! That’s right…our very own theme. There are a gazillion themes out there. Some good, some bad, some exactly like every other theme. So why do another one? Because we’ve got some damn good ideas, that’s why! Not to mention, about 70% of our web design clients use a theme we developed but never made public. So we figure if it’s good enough for 70% of them, it’s good enough for the general populace as well. The theme promises sexy whitespace, super-ultra-simple navigation, plenty of admin options, clean code that doesn’t suck, jaunty angles and a gorilla. Wait…no gorilla.

TONS and TONS of design work! Our clients are pure awesomeness. We’ve got more work than we can shake a stick at, and you can shake a stick at quite a lot of work. A big thank you to our clients, one and all. You guys have made our time in business a dream come true!

Well, there you have it. You’re updated and you know more about our business than I do.

We’ll be back soon with a great post that you budding designers and old timers alike will really enjoy: what we’ve learned in our first two years in business.

Subscribe to our feed so you’ll know right away the next time we post! Like maybe even next week!

Happy New Year!

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Charlie Pabst is a guitar-wielding designer, a sharp-shooting writer, and a tell-it-like-it-is ever-kid. He is also not afraid of hyphens.